


Without Words

by Gammarad



Category: Od Magic - Patricia A. McKillip
Genre: Characters who don't usually use music magic solve this specific problem with music magic, Gen, Music, Nonverbal Communication, Post-Canon, Wizards
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-12 15:54:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29013150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gammarad/pseuds/Gammarad
Summary: A gardener with a great natural magical gift, a by-the-book wizard who's learned he didn't understand nearly as much as he thought, and a cantrip-sewing princess who managed to escape an unwanted engagement: all trying to figure out how to communicate with shy, enormous, nonverbal shape-shifting beings who've come out of hiding.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4
Collections: Bulletproof 20/21





	Without Words

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Elsin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsin/gifts).



> A little background on the characters:
> 
> Brenden Vetch understands the strange, powerful shapeshifters from Scrygard Mountain better than anyone else. He understands them almost as well as he understands himself; too bad there's so much about himself he can't understand at all. He thought he was a gardener. He thought his power was a small thing. Turns out it can do a lot more than figure out which plants have magical uses. 
> 
> Princess Sulys doesn't understand the wordless beings from the North at all. She does know what it's like not to be listened to and not to want to be talked at. She sees the magic in the little things wizards tend to overlook. And even though she doesn't understand the ancient presences, she rather enjoys their company. 
> 
> Valoren thought he understood everything and that he had everything under control, and it's turned out he really, really didn't. He went from being the King's heir, the nation's protector, and the princess's fiancé, to being just another wizard trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. He's determined to restore his lost understanding and control, even if he can't regain everything else he's lost.

Once again, Brenden Vetch struggled to put the magic of the wordless powers into terms the wizards would understand.

"There is a space within them filled with a kind of wind," Brenden began. 

Valoren, lank and frowning as ever, listened intently. The other wizards of Od's school of magic rustled with distraction, murmured their questions from one to another. 

"Like the motion of water without the water," he attempted. "The movement of sap within a tree. And when there's too much, it spills out of them into the world." Here he lost the thread and what bit of their attention he had held. 

The beings of power who Od had brought back from Skrygard Mountain sought more of the world than simply whatever random creatures happened by, Brenden thought. "Each of them may try to change shape to either whatever animal or plant is near, or the one whose way through life most closely fits with the emotional," something. What? Maybe, "the emotional state the being is experiencing." 

The end of his speech almost sounded like a question. 

"But how do we talk to them?" one of the wizards asked. 

Valoren frowned at him. That was what Brenden was doing his best to explain. Valoren didn't like it when people asked the question that they knew he was already trying to answer. 

But Brenden understood. He hadn't been clear. He couldn't be clear. "Don't try to talk to them," he said in desperation. "Listen to them." 

"If they know I'm listening, and listen back, how do I know what they think I'm saying?" 

It was a good question. 

A person in a dark cloak at the back of the room began to play a tune on an ocarina. Everyone in front of them turned to look.

They finished, flashed a smile, and put the hood of the cloak down. It was Sulys, the princess. "I've been thinking," she said. "What was that tune saying? If you were listening," she added.

"That you were happy," someone said from the middle row. 

"That you have a sense of humor," someone else suggested.

"That you wanted our attention," Brenden heard Valoren mutter beside him. Clearly the wizard Valoren, one of the most powerful wizards in the school, knew the answer and also knew better than to say it aloud. Brenden thought if anyone would, it was Valoren; the man had been affianced to the princess, only to lose her when he ignored her for too long for things he thought, at the time, more important.

"It's the same way," Sulys said. "You know what they think you're saying the same way you know what people think you're saying when you play music."

Not so far away, where the wordless powers dwelled among the exotic creatures in what had been, until they moved in, the King's menagerie, a wind that was not a wind stirred and grew attentive. A sense of being watched crept over Brenden. He raised his hands, ready to speak again. "Music," Brenden said, "is how we talk to them." A sense of recognition filled him, a piece that fit a gap he had not known was there until he saw its match. A pure tone that echoed just right. "Princess," he said. "You know magic that can be done with all sorts of things that the wizards don't use for magic. Is there magic that can be done with music?"

"I never learned any from my great-grandmother Dittany, nor from Mistral," Sulys admitted. "But we should send to her and ask. Maybe she has learned of such a thing in her travels."

"And I will consult Ceta," said Yar, the acting head of the school in the absence of its founder, the wizard Od. "She may have read of magical music in her studies." Ceta was Valoren's cousin, a scholar of magical history, and Yar's betrothed, in exactly that order. The betrothal was new, maybe a week, and Yar was more easily distracted than he should be. 

It was allowing Valoren to take far too much of a role in the school's governance. He was doing better than Brenden feared, but not as well as he needed to. It had been four months since Od left them, and they had got approximately nowhere.

"I can do this," Valoren said. He walked into a group of the wizards who were most used to doing everything he said, and Brenden looked after him, a wrinkle of concern on his brow. The group of wizards spoke in low voices. 

Instead of listening to the words, Brenden listened as the beings from Skrygard Mountain would. He forgot language, forgot humanity, but he did not shape himself to plant or insect or stone. Nothing they said made sense but that they were trying to reach out any way they could, wildly and not knowing even how to try, worryingly chaotic. 

His name called him back into himself. "Brenden," Yar said, wonder tinging his voice, "what are you doing?"

"Listening," Brenden said absently. "To Valoren and the wizards."

"What," one of the youngest teachers asked, one who was as often as he could be in Valoren's shadow, "will we do to prevent giving insult? What if the music we play means something unforgivably rude and we don't realize it?"

It doesn't work that way, Brenden thought. "Don't intend rudeness and they won't hear it," he said, trying to reassure.

"Does any of you play an instrument?" Sulys asked them all. 

A few of the wizards did. Some looked up, one waved, several took a step toward the princess. "I play the timpany," one said. Another claimed the clavichord. 

"The rest of you can sing," Sulys told them. 

They took some time at it, at first discordant, the music falling apart into laughter and frustration after mere moments. But with practice, the wizards learned to play together, and then to weave their magic into the sound, as they once had woven their magic into a wall around the river. This time, instead of a barrier, they made an opening.

Brenden began to feel that they would succeed. Even Valoren was beginning to unbend, the magic in the music soothing his disappointment in his fall from favor. 

So he, a former gardener, began to learn to sing. First he listened to those who sang already, heard how their voices twined around one another, growing into the sky like a tree, reaching upward to the sun. He found the wind, the sap, the flow at the heart of the music, and the power within him matched his voice to theirs. Brenden sang in a dozen voices at once, and when the wizards noticed they silenced themselves to listen to the chorus that emerged from a single throat.

The silence encroached and stopped Brenden, the awe not right for what he meant to say. He had lost words again, but he gestured to them, still remembering the human language of hands and body and face, waving them back into harmony. They were joined by the beat of the timpany, the chime of the clavichord, the breath of the ocarina. 

And then the room began to fill with welcome, with space. It grew to twice, four times its size, more. The powers had followed the sound of welcome, the call of music, and joined their own wind to its melody. 

No one who was there wondered even for a moment what it meant. It could not be put into words, but nevertheless, it was clear. The magic rose, transformed the room around them. It grew clear as crystal, sparkling as rain, and sounds echoed around it in an unstopping spiral as though they had been translated into the heart of an enormous shell, in the sound of the ocean held within.

Od would be relieved, Brenden thought when his mind was human once more, a full day or so afterward. Or proud. He did not know her well enough to be sure which.


End file.
